The Weekly Standard reserves the right to use your email for internal use only. Occasionally,
we may send you special offers or communications from carefully selected advertisers we believe may be of benefit to our subscribers.
Click the box to be included in these third party offers. We respect your privacy and will never rent or sell your email.

Please include me in third party offers.

Could President Obama’s recent focus on climate change and the environment be a diversion? A way of softening up some of his supporters for the disappointment if his administration should approve construction of the Keystone Pipeline?

Who knows? But that’s not to say the possibility doesn’t make for interesting conversation and political speculation. It is, after all, the way things work in Washington. Ask Frank Underwood.

At any rate, if this is the strategy, it may not accomplish its objective as Laura Barron-Lopez and Justin Sink of The Hillwrite:

If a flurry of climate change initiatives is an attempt by the administration to soften up environmental supporters ahead of an approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, green groups say President Obama better think twice.

“There is not a blanket of regulations big enough to cover the pipeline elephant in the room,” said Jamie Henn of the green group 350.org. “There is nothing the administration could do to negate the impact the pipeline would have on the climate.”

If Obama approves Keystone, it will provoke a “vehement reaction” from environmental groups, said David Goldston, director of governmental affairs at the Natural Resources Defense Council.